In the past couple of years, several of my colleagues have simply vanished from the workplace.

No announcements made. No fond farewell. Just gone — some of them temporarily, some of them permanently.

I have to resort to alternative means of finding out what’s going on. Are they still in our email directory? Are they still on LinkedIn? Because asking direct questions of management or coworkers is discouraged, arouses suspicion, and often results in getting no meaningful information.

Two people’s workspaces were left as-is for months, as if they were going to return. They never did. (Finally someone was assigned to box up their personal effects and ship them home.)

Here’s the thing: we are directed by the company to think of ourselves as part of a team. Managers are even called “team leads” rather than “managers.”

But this is no way to run a team. Because teamwork requires a reasonable, bi-directional flow of information.

Imagine being a member of a sports team. One day, you show up for practice and ask “Where’s John?”

Everybody shrugs.

You ask your coach. “I can’t tell you,” he says.

Game day rolls around. “Where’s John?” Nobody knows, or nobody is talking. And this continues for most of the season.

It’s creepy and it’s unnecessary.

And it undermines trust.

Trust, of course, is essential to teamwork. To continue the sports metaphor, if you pass the ball to a teammate, you trust that they will make the effort to receive it with the overall goal of winning the game. You trust that your teammates are watching out for you to avoid injuries and pull off the win. You trust your coach to not be giving you bad advice or dangerous substances (although trust in coaches has been diminished by some very serious abuses on recent years).

In the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, the writer Sebastian Junger explains that the essence of trust and connection is the belief that the individual is willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the group and the group is willing to sacrifice for the individual. It is a reciprocal understanding.

Here, that ain’t happening.

Which leaves me to wonder what is behind all this secrecy. Laws and regulations? Company policy? Distrust of employees? Wanting to keep employees unsettled and always guessing?

Because of it were just a matter of simple human decency, there would be more information, not less.